We found an ancient tablet, dated it, reconstruded a long-dead language well enough to read it, reconstructed the night sky on that day, five and a half thousand years ago, found the orbit of this thing, and connected it to a geological formation thousands of kilometers away. Humans can do some amazing stuff.

That is one crazy story. I need to see this done in Hollywood graphics. They're claiming the asteroid came in so low that it did a flyby of the Levant, igniting any flammable object or person on its way, and slammed into the side of a mountain in the Alps

It's definitely not what I normally picture when I think about asteroids.

https://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2008/212017945233.html

http://historyofgeology.fieldofscience.com/2011/04/landslide...

There is something here that I do not understand. The article claims that

“[The tablet] is a copy of the night notebook of a Sumerian astronomer as he records the events in the sky before dawn on the 29 June 3123 BC”

But radiocarbon dating of trees buried in the landslide seems to have reliably dated the landslide to 7500 BC.

For example https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01695...

Update:

The Wikipedia article about the coauthor Mark Hempsell says:

“Hempsell got public audience as author of the book "A Sumerian Observation of the Köfels' Impact Event", with Alan Bond proposes a theory not accepted by the scientific community…”

The link posted in this thread by user arto calls the theory “pseudoscience”:

“Despite this new evidence, curiously in 2008 the impact hypothesis was revived by some pseudoscientists in connection to supposed observations of a meteorite by the Sumerians…”

Now the claim that the tablet, excavated from the palace of Ashurbanipal (650 BC) is actually from 3123 BC, seems very suspicious.

slop

vibe theorising